Quotes to inspire and reflect

The writer is only free when he can tell the reader to go jump in the lake. You want, of course, to get what you have to show across to him, but whether he likes it or not is no concern of the writer.

If the stuff you’re writing is not for yourself, it won’t work.

A simile must be as precise as a slide rule and as natural as the smell of dill.

Let us define a plot. We have defined a story as a narrative of events arranged in their time-sequence. A plot is also a narrative of events, the emphasis falling on causality. “The king died and then the queen died,” is a story. “The king died, and then the queen died of grief,” is a plot.

Fiction is a lie, and good fiction is the truth inside the lie.

Don’t say it was “delightful”; make us say “delightful” when we’ve read the description. You see, all those words (horrifying, wonderful, hideous, exquisite) are only like saying to your readers “Please will you do my job for me?”

The clouds above us join and separate, The breeze in the courtyard leaves and returns. Life is like that, so why not relax? Who can stop us from celebrating?

My characters are quite as real to me as so-called real people; which is one reason why I’m not subject to what is known as loneliness. I have plenty of company.

La vérité est en marche; rien ne peut plus l’arrêter .

J’accuse .

I am little concerned with beauty or perfection. I don’t care for the great centuries. All I care about is life, struggle, intensity. I am at ease in my generation.

There is more than one kind of wisdom, and all are essential in the world; it is not bad that they should alternate.

Another ancient and extensive class of languages, united by a greater number of resemblances than can well be altogether accidental, may be denominated the Indo-european, comprehending the Indian, the West Asiatic, and almost all the European languages.

The true birthplace is that wherein for the first time one looks intelligently upon oneself; my first homelands have been books.

No Jewish blood runs among my blood,

Radiant light consists in Undulations of the Luminiferous Ether.

Goddamit, look! We live here and they livethere. We black and they white. They got thingsand we ain’t. They do things and we can’t. It’s just like living in jail.

Who knows when some slight shock, disturbing the delicate balance between social order and thirsty aspiration, shall send the skyscrapers in our cities toppling?

One great society alone on Earth,

Though nothing can bring back the hour

High instincts before which our mortal nature

My heart leaps up when I behold

Who is the happy Warrior? Who is he

The wiser mind

We murder to dissect.

We are laid asleep

Dearest, I feel certain that I am going mad again: I feel we cant go through another of those terrible times. And I shant recoverthis time. I begin to hear voices, and cant concentrate. So I am doing what seems the best thing to do.

Further, the war—our waiting while the knives sharpen for the operation—has taken away the outer wall of security. . . . We pour to the edgeof a precipice . . . and then? I can’t conceive that there will be a 27th June 1941.

[ Final diary entry :] Occupation is essential. Andnow with some pleasure I find that it’s seven; and must cook dinner. Haddock and sausage meat. I think it is true that one gains a certain hold on sausage and haddock by writing them down.

One has to secrete a jelly in which to slipquotations down people’s throats—and one always secretes too much jelly.

Therefore if you insist upon fighting to protect me, or “our” country, let it be understood, soberly and rationally between us, that you are fighting to gratify a sex instinct which I cannotshare; to procure benefits which I have notshared and probably will not share; but not togratify my instincts, or to protect myself or my country. For . . . in fact, as a woman, I have no country. As a woman I want no country. As awoman my country is the whole world.

Death is the enemy. . . . Against you I willfling myself, unvanquished and unyielding, ODeath!

It was done; it was finished. Yes, she thought, laying down her brush in extreme fatigue, Ihave had my vision.

When, however, one reads of a witch beingducked, of a woman possessed by devils, of awise woman selling herbs, or even of a veryremarkable man who had a mother, then Ithink we are on the track of a lost novelist, asuppressed poet, of some mute and inglorious Jane Austen, some Emily Brontë who dashedher brains out on the moor or mopped andmowed about the highways crazed with thetorture that her gift had put her to. Indeed, Iwould venture to guess that Anon, who wroteso many poems without signing them, wasoften a woman.

Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.

I found myself thinking with intense curiosityabout death. Yet if I’m persuaded of anything, it is of mortality—Then why this sense that death is going to be a great excitement?—somethingpositive, active?

[ Of Elizabethan drama :] The word-coining genius, as if thought plunged into a sea of words and came up dripping.

On or about December 1910 human characterchanged. . . . All human relations haveshifted—those between masters and servants, husbands and wives, parents and children.And when human relations change there is atthe same time a change in religion, conduct, politics, and literature.

[ Of James Joyce’s Ulysses:] Never did I readsuch tosh. As for the first 2 chapters we willlet them pass, but the 3rd 4th 5th 6th—merelythe scratching of pimples on the body of thebootboy at Claridges.

One of the phrases that kept running through their conversation was “pushing the outside of the envelope.” The “envelope” was a flight-test term referring to the limits of a particular aircraft’s performance, how tight a turn it could make at such-and-such a speed, and so on. “Pushing the outside,” probing the outer limits, of the envelope seemed to be the great challenge and satisfaction of flight test.

The “Me” Decade and the Third Great Awakening.

All these years, in short, I had assumed that in art, if nowhere else, seeing is believing. Well—how very shortsighted! . . . I had gotten it backward all along. Not “seeing is believing,” you ninny, but “believing is seeing,” for Modern Art has become completely literary: the paintingsand other works exist only to illustrate the text .

Radical Chic . . . is only radical in Style; in its heart it is part of Society and its tradition—Politics, like Rock, Pop, and Camp, has its uses.

If a man has talent and cannot use it, he has failed. If he has a talent and uses only half of it, he has partly failed. If he has a talent and learns somehow to use the whole of it, he has gloriously succeeded, and won a satisfaction and a triumph few men ever know.

“Where they got you stationed now, Luke?” . . . [“]In Norfolk at the Navy base,” Luke answered, “m-m-making the world safe for hypocrisy.”

Duh poor guy! . . . Maybe he’s found out by now dat he’ll neveh live long enough to know duh whole of Brooklyn. It’d take a guy a lifetime to know Brooklyn t’roo an’ t’roo. An’ even den, yuh wouldn’t know it all.

It is this ability to bear what is unbearable and to go on living, to go on doing what one is used to doing—it is this uncanny ability that the existence of the human species is based on.

Slice him where you like, a hellhound is always a hellhound.